431: Mac Maintenance

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This was one of my favorite MPU episodes. It served as a reminder to take care of my mac and was full of useful information and resources. Thanks for all the time and effort that David and Katie put into it!

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Believe it or not, back in the late 90’s I had a boss who stored documents in the trash. She said it was because they were important and no one would look in the trash.

Then she told me to fix her computer and in the course f doing so I emptied the trash. Someone who stored files in the trash diesn’t take time to make backups on floppy discs either. Thought I was going to lose my job. She came to me the next day and apologized for blaming me when she stupidly stored files in the trash and didn’t make backups. I think her husband had something to do with my salvation.

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Ya. I’ve had people tell me the trash was their backup.

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Mine, too. It was also the most expensive MPU I have listened to. I bought a few new apps that they have been suggesting for a long time and had never got around to buying before.

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This episode reminded me that I should really invest in a new system for backups. So, I was looking into Backblaze and planned on pulling the trigger on it this weekend after so gathered up all of my external hard drives. Well, today, when I started up DaVinci Resolve, my external hard drive corrupted and crashed. I’m running Disk Drill to (hopefully) restore it, but I am 100% investing in Backblaxe now.

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Any luck? That’s the worst, hope all gets fixed.

Good news and bad news. I was able to recover about half my hard drive. I lost all of my Time Machine backups and a couple of 100gb zip archives I had, but thankfully I recovered all of the important stuff!

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I followed David and Katie’s advice and checked on the health of my startup disk from Disk Utility only to find some errors (detailed here.)

Glad I did though. I hope to fix the issue before disaster strikes, if at all!

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Hey, Did your Time Machine fail on you?

I am afraid of this happening to me to be honest and after listening to Katie in this episode I am thinking I may try a closet clone.

How do you run your backup system now since you had lost all that data!

Hey Guys,

Just thinking about this episode and it has made me “conscious” of the whole backup situation that I have, I only have the TimeMachine Basestation looking after my backup and now I think that is not enough because if that goes kaput i lose all the data!

Also am I right in saying Katie is against storing stuff in iCloud as a backup too? Whats everyones opinion on storing photos and documents as backup in the cloud?

I realized it was an issue with my dock and not my hard drive. I’ve since swapped out the dock and purchased a new drive for my backups. The other was about 2 years old. Everything still runs the same and I haven’t had any issues so far!

EDIT:
I should also note that I’m in the process of switching to iOS only, so I’m not too concerned with futureproofing my backup system.

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iCloud isn’t a good choice for backing up a Mac. It doesn’t do file versioning and it doesn’t support selective syncing which means your backup files from one Mac would be synced to another Mac. Probably not what you want.

I use Backblaze for my offsite backups.

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Ah! That explains why on my laptop there is a ton of storage being used by the iCloud Drive, Does BackBlaze take copies of my TimeMachine also? Not hooked to the laptop directly it is accessed via the home network.

Oh wow, that will be a good one to read. Hope you have a blog post or something for us in here to share the experience with :wink: Full iOS would be great to be honest but I don’t think I am quite there just yet.

No, drives have to be directly connected, not on a network. And if you do temporarily connect it and let it copy over you need to reconnect it at least once a month (for as long as it will take to complete the backup) or BackBlaze will delete that drive’s contents.

It should have been spelled out at sign-up, but people forget - in fact a close friend lost the Backblaze backup of a 4Tb external drive filled with videos that she’d periodically connect to her Macbook Pro; she was always taking her MBP with her and Backblaze was able to back up her Mac when she reconnected to WiFi at home, but she neglected to plug in the external.

From the tech note:

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Ah! Right is there any alternatives other than BackBlaze that allow to back up NAS? (TimeMachine) And I don’t hook up to the machine once a month due to the nature of it being hidden in a closet (out of sight out of mind)

Thanks @bowline glad you cleared that up in Lehman’s terms.

You might consider whether your Time Machine data needs to be backed up offsite. Backblaze keeps 30 days of history. If you had a catastrophe at home and lost your Mac and NAS, you would be able to restore any file up to 30 days old from Backblaze.

If you think you might need to restore something older than 30 days, then you’ll want to backup your Time Machine data too.

For my needs, the 30-day limit is acceptable so I don’t backup my Time Machine data offsite.

If you have other data on the NAS that needs to be backed up, you can look at using Backblaze B2, Google Drive, AWS S3 and others. B2 seems to be the cheapest per GB. Your NAS probably has support for several services.

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Thanks @scottj Great post, I have a few options that I need to consider for my backup situation

I remember listening to this episode and the recommend some uninstaller but I must be missing them in the show notes. Does anyone know which ones they recommenced in this episode or have some recommendations themself?